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A project aiming to harness geothermal energy from disused, flooded coal mines in the northeast of England took another step forward this week after it was given planning permission for an initial testing phase.

A prestigious intergovernmental organization created by the world’s advanced economies is pointing out the bottleneck in the plans to substitute so-called green energy for hydrocarbon-based energy: the availability of key minerals necessary for battery storage, wind farms, solar panels, and other gizmos necessary for the switchover. Simply put: the world can’t provide the quantity of those minerals that would be necessary, and the environmental and social impact of trying to mine them in sufficient quantities would be devastating.The cure, in other words, is worse than the disease. You can download the 287-page report here.The International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental...

If Australia’s wind turbine fleet hadn’t cost power consumers $20 billion to build, the joke would almost be funny. Spread from Far North Queensland to the West Coast of South Australia, on the Eastern Grid, Australia’s wind farms are located in 5 States: Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria, NSW and Queensland (see below). In SA they’re spread from Port Augusta in the North, west to Cathedral Rocks on lower Eyre Peninsula and south to Millicent in the South-East. In Tasmania, Cape Portland (Musselroe) and Woolnorth (Cape Grim) are situated on its northern coastline. There are turbines spread all over Victoria, from...

Commuting by subway -- or some other form of public transportation -- and commuting by car epitomize two dramatically different lifestyles in the United States.In the former, for example, an American might live in a high-rise building in a densely populated urban area. He rides an elevator to the street each morning and then descends via an escalator to an underground chamber, where he stands on a concrete slab until a crowded train comes along.When he boards that train, he is likely to stand, holding the metal rail above his head to make sure he does not fall when the...

<p>Yesterday, the guys over at Powerline blog had this interesting little story on the practical realities as to why “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar power will NEVER generate the power needed to supply the vast electrical demands of the United States, notwithstanding all the proclamations and pledges made by moronic politicians chasing after “green votes”.</p>

Wind and solar energy are both essentially obsolete technologies. There is a reason why only the very rich or the very adventurous sail across oceans: the wind is unreliable, and at best produces relatively little energy. Nevertheless, liberals have concocted fantasies whereby all of our electricity, or perhaps our entire economy, will be powered by those fickle sources. There are a number of reasons why this will never happen, but a paper published last week by Center of the American Experiment argues that land use constraints are the most basic reason why wind and solar are inexorably destined to fail....

California will stop issuing new permits for hydraulic fracking by January 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Friday. The Democrat governor also instructed the California Air Resources Board to research how to phase out oil extraction by 2045 in the Golden State. The move is regarded mostly as symbolic as California Department of Conservation records show fracking accounts for only 2 percent of oil extraction in the state. “The climate crisis is real, and we continue to see the signs every day,” Newsom said in a statement. “I’ve made it clear I don’t see a role for fracking in that...

This Thursday, Earth Day, politicians and activists will shout more about "the climate crisis." I don't think it's a crisis. COVID-19, malaria, exploding debt, millions of poor children dying from diarrhea -- those are genuine crises. But global warming may become a real problem, so it's particularly absurd that Earth Day's activists rarely mention the form of energy that could most quickly reduce greenhouse gases: nuclear power. When France converted to nuclear, it created the world's fastest reduction in carbon emissions. But in America, nuclear growth came to a near halt 40 years ago, after an accident at the Three...

Am I the only one who finds it head-scratching that President Joe Biden, who wants to spend $2 trillion of taxpayer money on "infrastructure," is the same president whose first act in the White House was to kill a multibillion-dollar oil and gas pipeline that would create some 15,000 jobs? The Keystone pipeline that he canceled was vital to our energy infrastructure and wasn't going to cost taxpayers a penny. The Biden infrastructure plan is a head fake. The agenda here isn't about creating "millions of new jobs." It's a declaration of war against one of the largest sources of...

Angry utility customers in places like Grand Valley and Grand Mesa pen poison letters: “It’s a monopoly! Reduce obscene CEO pay!”. When Grand Valley Power CEO Tom Walch gets worked up explaining what he sees as the avarice and ignorance of Xcel Energy and worries he is not conveying his rage, he pulls out a letter from an angry co-op customer and starts reading. “They shouldn’t unload this blunder on customers who happen to be on their electrical grid,” Walch recites. “This is going to hurt a lot of businesses here and elsewhere that are already hurting due to the...

Correcting the record is important since assigning the wrong reasons for Texas’s electric blackouts will lead to the wrong solutions.hen the lights went out in Texas earlier this year, corporate media and the left swiftly developed a narrative and stuck to it: Texas failed because it didn’t regulate enough and it wasn’t part of the national grid.This storyline also claimed a lack of electricity from wind and solar had nothing to do with the disaster that claimed almost 60 lives. Instead, the blackouts were the failure of normally reliable thermal power—natural gas, coal, and nuclear—due to a reluctance to spend...

CommentaryPresident Joe Biden followed his raft of heavy-handed climate executive orders by announcing his loftiest goal yet: slashing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in half by the end of the decade.Biden’s ambitious climate fantasy is doomed to fail—not only failing to reach his emissions target, but also failing utterly to make the slightest impact on climate change.The best solution for preserving the natural beauty of our nation, contrary to the president’s pontificating, is to fully embrace domestically produced energy. Long-term environmental quality is a product not of big-government mandates, but of freedom and economic prosperity.Biden’s plan is hopeless because modern life...

Does President Joe Biden really want the United States to cede its hard-won energy independence and leadership position in the world? Because that is precisely what will happen if the president tries to sweep away the inexpensive, reliable forms of energy that have been powering America for decades. To understand the disaster that awaits the nation if Biden makes good on his pledge to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, we need only look to California and Texas, two states that have already tried to do exactly that. Power outages are now commonplace in California. Its troubles are...

Fearing that incessant warnings about manmade climate cataclysms would not be enough to end U.S. fossil fuel use, the Obama-Biden administration instructed a special Interagency Working Group to concoct a “social cost of carbon” concept. The SCC would “scientifically” calibrate the dollar value of damages that a ton of carbon dioxide emitted today in America would inflict on the USA and world in the future.The price tag was set at $22/ton in 2010, raised to $36/ton in 2013, and just as arbitrarily increased to $40, before finishing the Obama era at $51/ton. President Trump disbanded the IWG and had the...

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated that the Biden administration wants to place 40% of the benefits in clean energy into communities that have “been hurt by the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy” and have suffered from pollution. Granholm said, “[T]he Biden administration wants to put 40% of the benefits of the investments in this clean energy economy, which you’re going to see in the jobs package next go-around, into communities that have suffered from environmental pollution and also been hurt by the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy — away...

Last month, President Biden signed a series of executive orders undermining fossil fuels, on the grounds the “climate crisis” forced his hand. “We can’t wait any longer. We see with our own eyes. We know it in our bones. It is time to act.” Within days, most of the country was seeing “with our own eyes” and feeling “in our bones” a cold wave so severe that five million people lost electricity and, in a special irony, nearly half of the ballyhooed wind turbines in Texas, which had risen to supply 23% of her energy, were left frozen (and inoperable)....

What’s behind the devastating power outages in Texas? Some say the problem was freezing natural gas pipelines; some say it’s because wind turbines froze or mismanagement by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). To find out what’s going on in Texas, I sat down with Jason Isaac, who predicted a power crisis in Texas months ago. He’s the director of Life:Powered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation seeking to “raise America’s energy IQ.” This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.

“Fool me once,” Stephen King wrote, “shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” His adage certainly applies to the myth (and fake math) of green jobs. During the 2020 election campaign, Joe Biden asserted that more than 3 million Americans are already “employed in the clean energy economy.” He then boasted that, “if executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class … and not just in cities along the...

So let me get this straight: we can land on Mars (average temperature –81 degrees F), seek out signs of ancient life, collect samples of Mars to be saved in orbit until retrieved by a later mission and land the first helicopter on another world…but we can’t keep the electric grid and water pumps in Texas operating during a cold spell? Something tells me this is a human problem rather than a technological one, as everyone knows you have to winterized wellheads, pipelines and gauges in order to keep natural gas (still the primary source of electricity production in the...

I’m sure by now that you’ve heard of the awful, historic snow and ice storms experienced in the state of Texas over the past few days. The issues that have arisen as a result of the storm bring into light a number of extremely concerning issues around the push for “green energy” that you hear Democrats talk about incessantly. According to the Washington Examiner, former Energy Secretary under President Donald Trump and former Texas governor, Mr. Rick Perry, issued a dire warning about green energy after the catastrophe in Texas this week. “They don’t care about your lives in those...